Settle in for arancini with Annalee Newitz as we discuss how difficult (and disappointing) it would have been to eat a trilobite, what writing their non-fiction books taught them about creating the arcs of novels, why their brain seems more suited for novels than short stories, how best to include a message in fiction without the soapbox overwhelming the story, the greatest bad review one of their books ever got (it involved creamed corn), how to inhabit characters who are hundreds of years old, fun facts they learned about moose which helped make their new book better, the music they blasted to rev up for one of the novel's big action scenes, how to make the growth of a fictional romance believable to readers, the serendipitous way in which Ken McLeod rekindled their love of science fiction, and much more.
Polish off a Polish meal with Walter Jon Williams while we discuss why when he started out he didn't think he was good enough to make it as a science fiction writer, how if I were to read his first drafts they'd terrify me, the con at which Gordon Dickson wandered around trying to sell one of Walter's novels to editors, why the '50s was the Golden Age of historical fiction in America, the way in which his first science fiction novel was an inversion of all the historical fiction he'd written before, which issues of <em>Fantastic Four</em> got him so angry he quit reading comics for 20 years, how deep he was into his career before he finally realized he might actually make a go at this writing thing, the most frequent problem found when teaching Taos Toolbox, what he learned about his Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated “Surfacing” by leaving it untouched in a drawer for six months, his motivation for the one time he had to say no to an editorial suggestion, what his extremely rare bouts of writers block — lasting only a few days — were really about, and much more.